Why would you say something like this? And why, as a journalist, would you report it? It's a transparent lie; nobody is going to be taken in by it. So why bother even saying it?
> nobody is going to be taken in by it.
Unfortunately, you don’t know that to be true. Relatives I’ve spoken with who own FB stock love to read statements like this to justify their position.
The lack of transparency around speech in your case only works against journalists when their credibility is questioned. They gain nothing omitting frivolous statements as opposed to printing them and letting members of the public point out how stupid they are.
All this says to people is that Instagram is getting more annoying.
The community got mad when they tried to say this was to cultivate "a sense of accomplishment" when the goal was really to encourage players to buy lootboxes in order to skip the grind.
"So, what I told you was true... from a certain point of view."
I think we'll find that their numbers are saying the loss of revenue of people leaving because they have to always login is far less than the uptick in revenue to be made from the changes this will allow. They rolled this out weeks ago in Australia, and would have been watching for the backlash.
I think (the following is pure speculation) this is just a first step of a number of changes around monetisation. This basically locks the backdoor, where they prevent people not on the platform from browsing feeds for free.
The real change is going to be when users (celebrities and businesses mostly) find they have to pay to reach all of their followers (who surprise, surprise now have to be logged in). They may not require "boosting" for under 1000 (or even 10,000) followers which will keep most users and wannabee influencers on the platform, even if they have to give a couple of dollars to Instagram when they push a product. You may find the advertisers end up just paying more.
It's the mega-users with multi-million followers they want to monetise, Users who get paid 10-100s thousands of dollars per post where Instagram doesn't get a cut despite being the delivery platform. Compared to what it costs for advertising on traditional media such as radio or TV, even a dollar to reach 10,000 followers would be nothing.
But you can't enforce payment when their followers can simply logout and view the feed for free. I would expect the popup appearing immediately rather than after a few scrolls to be implemented soon.
This is important from a corporate legal standpoint because it makes you as slippery as possible. Words have a tendency to come back to haunt you.
It seems so blatantly ridiculous, and I feel like it does more harm than good, but they must have reason to think otherwise?
I agree with the other commentor. This term indicates it was done on purpose. It describes the stare of the power line. I think it's better than blackout.